Saturday, May 19, 2012

Ten matinees

Wanderlust starts well, heaping misery on
Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd at a good fast clip; then it slows down, and
becomes the story of how the residents of a present-day commune, all played by
sketch comedy veterans, make Jennifer Aniston feel welcome, and the movie
becomes a movie about Jennifer Aniston being in the movie. She stopped by our clubhouse, and she was so normal! But really
she’s too big for the clubhouse.

***

Goon, a comedy set in the world of
minor-league hockey, suffered the fate of a limited release, wandering,
goon-like, into few theaters, for a single week, right in the middle of one of
our nation’s periodic epidemics of hand-wringing over violence in sports, which
is ironic, considering that Goon is
very sweet, and the worst thing that happens is someone loses a tooth;
meanwhile, in 21 Jump Street, now
playing everywhere, it’s supposed to be hilarious when someone loses his dick
in a gunfight.

***

When you’re
young, it’s easy to feel you might be good at anything that interests you.
Boundaries are for old people. If you enjoy movies, and you think you have an
artistic streak, you might have tried making one at some point; or at least
harbored the notion that you could, with little or no training, if you chose to
try.

In the good
old days, you might have turned out to be Sam Raimi.

In the bad
current day, you’ll more likely produce movies featuring your friends drinking
in their bathtubs, with a twee original score performed on a Casiotone
keyboard.

Proof that
I’d become an old person arrived a few years back, when I tried to watch a few
of these movies, which critics saddled with the genre-name “mumblecore.”

What makes
young, no-budget filmmakers think the lives of underemployed young people make
for better cinema than dirt-cheap splatter flicks?

I held out
some hope for the Duplass brothers, who tried to double-down with their
meta-slasher-mumblecore-opus, Baghead.

Jeff, Who Lives At Home is the second film they’ve made with
recognizable actors. The first was Cyrus,
in which lonely divorced John C. Reilly starts dating the poorly-conceived
character played by Marisa Tomei, only to run afoul of Jonah Hill, her
horrible, horrible son. In that film, their handheld,
point-and-shoot-and-crash-zoom aesthetic worked; it seemed like a natural fit with
the story of a mollycoddled “genius”—as if Jonah Hill’s sociopath had shot the
film.

But in Jeff, Who Lives At Home, that same
aesthetic, combined with a cast of familiar television-comedy actors, a lighter
tone, and a brief running time, just left me feeling like I’d been had – lured
to the cinema to watch Must See TV.

***

The Cabin in the Woods is a hoot.

***

The
meet-cute scene can tell you a lot about the romantic comedy you’re about to
watch.

In The Five-Year Engagement, Jason Segel
and Emily Blunt meet at a costume party in San Francisco; she’s made up as
Princess Di, he’s a giant pink bunny. In Lockout,
Guy Pearce and Maggie Grace meet (in a maximum-security-prison space station
orbiting the Earth) when he brings her back from the dead with a chemical
injection to the brain by way of a hypodermic needle plunged straight into her
eyeball.

Needless to
say, that Princess Di business is kinda creepy.

***

Marvel’s The Avengers is probably the closest a
gazillion-dollar production will get to reproducing on film my experience of
reading a twenty-five cent comic book under a shade tree in 1974.

How much you
enjoy the effort should depend heavily on whether or not you consider this
progress.

***

Built in the
‘40s as a movie palace, the State Theater had been chopped into a two-story
four-screener by the time I started hanging out in Ann Arbor, in the ‘80s. When
I moved to Ann Arbor, in the ‘90s, only the second-story screens were still in
business, the ground floor having been sold to a clothing store. And so it
remains to this day: you enter a narrow street entrance with a box office
that’s often unoccupied (tickets at the concession stand), climb a winding
staircase, and walk in confusion through a second-floor lobby with the haphazard
décor of a bed-and-breakfast, to sit in one or the other red-velvet half of the
former balcony, at a strange angle to the screen, fighting off vertigo until
the lights go down.

When I was
in high school, it was an inconspicuous place to sober up, on a Saturday night,
before driving home: at the late show, watching the cinematic efforts of
disreputable types like Harry Reems, Bo Derek, and Mel Gibson. (“How many
penises does Harry have? Just the one? I’m okay to drive now.”)

After I
moved to Ann Arbor, a housemate took a job at the State, so I stopped by a
couple nights a week and got waved in to Farewell,
My Concubine and The Addams Family
Values and A Perfect World and Larry
Clark’s Kids – any damn thing,
really. Free movies at the State turned me into a moviegoer, always looking forward to my
next trip to the cinema (even after the free part evaporated), going every week – rather than waiting for a draw, as
I had in the past.

After years
of absence, I saw Damsels in Distress
at the State. I didn’t know what to make of the idea of a Whit Stillman movie
without Chris Eigeman in it; after seeing Damsels,
I don’t know what to make of the reality of it, either.

Part of the
great charm of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco was their specificity. They were
time-stamped, and openly class-conscious, in a way few movies ever are, more
like novels in that regard; is there another English-language film set in
Barcelona? They were plotted more like literary novels than films, too.

Damsels, though, takes place in Cloud Cuckoo
Land. The cuckoos are still pretty charming, and I felt won over by the final
third, but the afterglow hasn’t lasted.

(Where was
Eigeman? Acting in Lena Dunham’s “Girls.” Do I have to get HBO now? Damn you,
Eigeman.)

***

With The
Dictator, Sasha Baron Cohen has finally made something that will age well.
In fact, it may prove timeless. See it right away, though, because it’s really
fucking funny.

1 comment:

Note: I haven't seen Woody Allen's "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and didn't think of it while writing the above. To answer my own question, there is at least one other English-language film set in Barcelona.